Analog

I've always resented the idea of blogs, blogging, and the very sound of the word "blogosphere." I understand that with mainstream news agencies suffering from budget cutbacks, that it's more and more difficult to capture the "pulse of the populous" by simply talking to the man or the woman on the street. Paying attention to bloggers is an easy way out: armchair journalism for an armchair world. I have to ask where the legitimacy is in that process. Giving recognition to a blog simply because it's visited often doesn't necessarily describe the person or people involved, nor does it describe the actual representativeness of the population sample. Traditional media's over-emphasis on blogs is as wicked as its over-emphasis on violent crime: despite its decline during the Clinton administration, violence was widely reported, giving the impression that more of it was going on than was in previous years ( see the Journal of Communication , Mar '